On Moral Fiction by John Gardner
Published 1978 · 205 pages · 64,469 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is On Moral Fiction to read?
On Moral Fiction scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Clear, polemical prose aimed at a broad literary audience rather than a specialist one.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Abstract ethical claims about fiction's purpose are grounded in specific, named examples from contemporary and classical literature.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Dense with critical judgments and examples, though the central argument is simple enough to state in a sentence.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Gardner names his targets directly and states his thesis without evasion.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Critical and polemical rather than symbolic; the argument proceeds analytically.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Gardner is earnest to the point of combativeness; irony is not his mode.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- The book builds to explicit moral conclusions about what fiction should and should not do.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Three main sections — the theory, the application to contemporary writers, the historical models — organized in clear sequence.
How On Moral Fiction is regarded
On Moral Fiction holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.